St. Edward's University ,3100 South Congress Ave.,Austin,TX,78704

Find us at John Slatin AccessU 2017

The beauty of accessibility

Wednesday, May 17, 2017, 8:30 am Central

Location: Room TH 116

We all want to design beautiful websites and applications, but the most beautiful website is the one that works for everyone. When you add accessibility to your design process, you are designing for everyone.

In this session, we debunk the myth that making an accessible site equates to making an ugly site. We will discuss common issues we see at Simply Accessible, with a focus on maintaining aesthetics while making sites accessible. We’ll break out into small groups to work on solving some common issues, like making text easier to read and images available to everyone. Then we’ll come back together and review the solutions. Everyone is welcome to provide feedback in a respectful, loving way.

Caryn Pagel

You're not alone: tools for the lonely developer

Thursday, May 18, 2017, 10:15 am Central

Location: Room TH 215

Common solutions to accessibility problems are usually technical, so many people assume accessibility is a technical problem, which means it’s meant to be solved by developers (hint: it’s not). As fun and challenging as developing for accessibility can be, it can also feel overwhelming and alienating when you don’t feel like you’ve got the support you need.

Thinking about accessibility more holistically, especially how it relates to roles in agile teams and across the larger developer community, can help us better understand the problem and ultimately do better work for our users.

In this session we’ll discuss the burden of accessibility on developers and talk about solutions to:

* Spreading the responsibility for making our products and services accessible across teams

* Integrating feedback from people with disabilities into the product lifecycle

Devon Persing

Structured content and navigation

Thursday, May 18, 2017, 4:00 pm Central

Location: Room TH 104

In this interactive session, you will learn about proper heading and table structure, and why they matter. We cover writing content for everyone and methods for skipping navigation. Through hands-on activities done in small groups, everyone will have an opportunity to practice these techniques. After practice, we will have time to reflect upon and share about our experiences.

Caryn Pagel

The accessibility layer cake: using progressive enhancement for web accessibility

Thursday, May 18, 2017, 4:00 pm Central

Location: Room TH 215

Fitting accessibility into the rapidly evolving web means also thinking about accessibility from a progressive enhancement perspective. In our technology stack, what is the lowest-stack solution for providing users with an accessible experience?

When we build websites and apps, we spend a lot of time thinking about, worrying over, and tinkering with our technology stack. We labor over our mobile-first responsive layout frameworks. We get excited about new libraries that solve old (but persistent) problems and do the heavy lifting to create consistent experiences in a cross-device, hybrid interface, platform agnostic world. We’re always looking for solutions that will work without us having to do a lot to maintain them. But, when it comes to accessibility, how are we thinking about the tools we use (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and ARIA)? Are we crossing our fingers and looking for solutions to make things we’ve already built accessible, or are we considering accessibility from the beginning as we design our systems and infrastructure?

In this talk we’ll explore common challenges developers face by looking at code examples that demonstrate different ways of addressing accessibility problems, targeting the simplest solutions. We’ll talk about ways to get your progressive accessibility practice started and point you in the direction of solving issues for the largest audience using the simplest solutions.

Devon Persing

Inclusive development bootcamp

Friday, May 19, 2017, 8:30 am Central

Location: Room TH104

When we discover—often late in a project or even after a launch—that what we built isn’t accessible to people with disabilities, we can feel both frustrated and defeated. As professionals working on the web, we’re champions for the user, but with accessibility, we aren’t even sure how to start. How can we account for everyone’s needs when there are so many competing priorities? What do we know about users with disabilities and how they interact with our content? How can we incorporate inclusive practices into what we receive from other teams and what we ourselves build without negatively impacting our designs and development?

In this interactive workshop created for anyone who participates in the UX and development process with a responsibility to test your own work, Elle and Devon from the Simply Accessible team will guide attendees on how to consider accessibility at each stage of a project and within each role. Learn how to start with inclusive thinking and then how to build those principles and techniques into the process. Elle and Devon will provide you with easy-to-adopt techniques for designers, developers, and testers. Learn core principles that you can start putting into practice tomorrow.

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